Primitive forms of personality testing date back to the 18th-19th century, where practitioners would assess a person's personality by the pseudoscientific methods of phrenology (measuring the person's skull) and physiognomy (assessing personality based on the person's outward appearance). Over time, personality testing evolved to include more empirical data, rather than superficial, surface characteristics of the person. For example, the Woolworth Personal Data Sheet was developed in 1919 to enable the U.S. Army to screen out individual recruits/draftees that might be susceptible to shell shock while in combat conditions. This test included a self-report inventory, whereby the person answered direct questions about behaviors, symptoms, characteristics, and traits associated with mental disorder(s). These direct answers allowed a test administrator to assess and/or determine whether the person was mentally ill or showing characteristics of potential mental illness. However, a person taking a self-report inventory can easily manipulate the outcome of the test, by denying certain behaviors, providing inaccurate answers regarding severity and frequency, or exaggerating severity and frequency. Furthermore, the self-report inventory provided no context for the test result. In other words, there were no indications if the result was valid in high stress, non-combat environments.
In 1921, psychologist Carl Jung published his book “Psychological Types”, where he presented his typological model of human psychological types. Jung theorized that there are four principal psychological functions by which people experience the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. According to Jung, one of these four functions is dominant most of the time. Based on Jung's writings, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers began creating their personality questionnaire during World War II to help women identify industrial labor jobs for which they would be best suited. The questionnaire developed into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (“MBTI”), which was published in 1962. While the MBTI proved to be popular, it suffers from the same issues of the early self-reporting inventories—the person being tested could easily manipulate the outcome and the results did not contemplate or account for different contextual settings.
Additional tests have been developed since the MBTI, with a signficant number relying on extensive questionnaires to determine personality traits, temperament, etc. Generally speaking, a significant number of these test failed to account for context as well. In the 1980s, David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates developed a personality inventory based on the MBTI, whereby the sixteen MBTI personality types were placed into four groups, each group being associated with four temperaments: rational, idealist, artisan, and guardian. Additional refinements to this personality inventory associated a color with each of the four temperaments. This assignment of colors did little to advance the accuracy of personality testing, as the color was merely a proxy for one of the four temperaments. Furthermore, the person's “dominant” color controlled and the “order” of the remaining colors did not impart any significant meaning. In other words, there was no significant difference between being “Gold, Blue, Green, Orange” (GBGrO) and “Gold, Blue, Orange, Green” (GBOGr) in various contextual settings.
As a result of these shortcomings, personality testing has generally failed to account for different contextual settings that the test taker finds themselves in, e.g., a person may exhibit certain traits and behaviors at home, while exhibiting significantly different traits and behaviors while at work. These personality tests also fail to provide information to the test taker regarding how to best interact with others in those different contextual settings, e.g., how to work effectively with a “OGrBG” person when the test taker is “GBGrO”, and how that changes in a social setting.
Despite advances in today's computing technology and Internet connectivity, current personality testing methodologies still fail to account for contextual settings when assessing personality and, therefore, cannot provide guidance to the test taker on how to best interact with others in those contextual settings. At best, modern technology has moved the long-form, tedious, and easily-manipulated questionnaires from paper onto a computer screen without adding significant benefits to the test takers or those administering the tests.